Just playing songs - developer or time waster?

Playing Technique
#30

…I can think of one way, however, that you do achieve technique-focus while just playing a lot of songs. Maybe this is what Eller (others? you?) did. It came to me when he talked about playing your favorite guitarist’s inspirations when that fav’s own music is beyond you…

So in other words, your fav is technical A+, but his inspirations were Bs. So if you play a lot of those B’s - and what’s more, you start with their easier stuff, so maybe it’s really more like C - and you play a lot… hey look, we’re back to the chunking think again! You’re burning in patterns at a doable speed through tons of repetition - same as you would be if you followed Claus Levin’s advice.

#31

I don’t think Eller is saying “never do exercises or focused practice of short phrases.” He’s saying “make sure those aren’t the only things you do.”

The point is that if you ever intend to record full length songs, or especially if you ever intend to perform full length songs live with other musicians, one of the best things to prepare yourself for that is to ensure that you have practiced… playing full length songs.

1 Like
#32

I try to split my guitar time in three ways: 1. technique and exercises, 2. writing - improvisation and theory and finally 3. learning songs for the next gig, RARELY just because I like them. If I learn a song just because, it is because is hard, I can’t play it yet or something like that - in a way I know I will get something out of it.

Anything we do is better than doing nothing, just like physical exercise. However, doing the same ALL the time is just another way to pigeon-whole ourselves. It happened/s to me a lot that if I practice the same all the time, my phrases are almost indistinguishable from one song to another.

I find the following exercise really helpful:

Learn a song, understand the progression, find a backing track, try to improvise on a similar progression (say for example a mode or certain scale) and attempt the technique or lick I learnt, even if at a lower speed etc…

An analogy would be go to the gym to get huge, or go to the gym, train, play sports to be athletic and actually functional. Stupid, but it works for me.

#33

I think a lot of people would agree with you… but let’s go to the tape:

“I never even really spent any time practicing any of those core, foundational techniques that we use all the time as guitar players. I just learned songs that used them and played along with the recordings.”

What’s more, here’s Troy:

“If you want to know whether it’s necessary to do highly repetitive exercise-type practice… I can tell you for sure the answer is no. I never did that.”

[in both cases, emphasis mine - but those are direct, accurate quotes]

I wanna be clear that this is not a game of gotcha. I’m not trying to nail or disprove anyone. In fact, I’m fascinated by comments like this because, deep down, I believe them.

The fascination is that it runs so counter to much of what we hear coming from the world of guitar teaching. But hey, you can’t argue with success. That’s why I’m trying to decipher it.

And I’m interested in what you have to say as well. How do you understand these statements? Sounds like you don’t take them literally like I do. Yet I think we can agree that these guys weren’t sitting there with a Mel Bay book and a metronome.

(I’ll throw in one more theory of my own… You could play a lick at a doable speed for months, like Claus Levin says he did. Or you could go a completely different way like Eller and play tons of songs. But wait a minute… Levin was slowly training the whole neuro-muscular apparatus in a way that speed and accuracy began to flow on their own… Eller kept changing the tune - but he was also training the whole neuro-muscular apparatus to slowly speed up and coordinate on its own, without too much deliberate effort. So maybe one used a single lick, the other countless more - but they were essentially doing the same thing, at the physiological level…?)

#34

I’m not trying to play “gotcha” either, but I don’t interpret those quotations the same way you do.

I think Troy and Ben both are rightly speaking out against going too far down a rabbithole of “regimented amuscal technical practice.” But when Eller says “I just learned songs that used them…”, stop and think about how much room there is for interpretation on what actually goes into “learning a song.” I think you’re taking his statement too literally and broadly. How likely is it that when he was learning a song, he always played nonstop from the first bar to the last bar, never stopping to work on tricky bits?

Most old-school guys who talk about learning from vinyl records talk about moving the record slowly with their hand to figure out the tricky fast parts. That in itself is anathema to the idea of playings nonstop from beginning to end every time, and speaks to dissecting and repeating tricky parts. And since transcriptions were often either entirely unavailable or lousy, people had to transcribe from the record in order to learn the songs they wanted to play. It’s highly unlikely that transcription was done without repition of the tricky parts.

Since @Troy is right here on the forum, we can get his own clarification of his quote. But I’ll be shocked if he says he never spent time working on particular difficult phrases, or never practiced a solo without playing the entire song that surrounds it. That is, there’s a lot of room in between one extreme of “I played 2-bar exercises with a metronome for 6 hours a day, never moving onto the next exercise until the last one was perfect” and the other extreme of “all I did was play along to records, and once I dropped the needle to start a song, I never stopped playing until the song was over”.

I think the problems Eller and Troy are warning people against are: 1) spending time on exercises that aren’t useful musical phrases, and 2) excessively and obsessively practicing fragments outside of musical context.

And another important point in favor of including “full length songs” in your practice, is that even if they had zero value for developing technique (though I don’t think that’s true), they have value in other ways, improving patience, listening skills, and consistent time.

Agree 100%. :smiley:

But I’ll close with a few Eller quotes from the video that speak to the point about “balance”:

1 Like
#35

I’ve been at a very low point with my playing, to put it mildly. This thread represents a lot of internal dialogue I’ve been having lately. I can only speak from my experiences or lack of!

I believe I’ve developed the necessary rudimentary chops that I thought I needed thanks to CTC. I’m at that point where it’s the “morning after the revolution”, what now, where do I go from here. What does music mean to me at this point, how is it different from a decade or two ago?

Finally learned all the notes on the fretboard recently, it took an app to get it done, “FretQuiz” on Android. Also playing a game to learn to read music notation fluently. These are things I keep working at, something tells me they’re essential tools for a Eureka moment I may have down the road.

I’m learning more songs these days, classic rock, mostly stuff from the 80, my fav era. But there’s another side to this, at some point growing up everything after the Black Metallica album was just fusion jazz rock funk, and a lot of blues as well, country did come in but much later, huge respect for all the Nashville cats, got me to embrace the clean single-coil bridge pickup that a lot of folks struggle with.

Here’s where I’m at right now, my game plan is to start concentrating on improvisation and writing. Hell, I’d love to play baroque like ted green but also not be a fish out of water playing over fusion changes.

I think I need some help, guidance and/or reassurance from more experienced players here. My current approach is to work on modal exercises. For a refreshing change, I’m not playing blindly or by ear entirely, since I know the notes I can try to start targeting the chord tones and understand how they transition over changes with some sort of way to develop voice leading, to play something that sounds more meaningful.

I also like the Beato video on the spread or dropped chords, this is what I need to start working on immediately I think. Part of the basics I severely lack at the moment.

I totally get the learning songs things, but I’ve never worked out enoght of songs nor have I really analysed what going on even with simple songs, neither have I developed the ear to know what changes are on by ear, like a I IV V, or II, VI, I etc. I think these are things that worry my now more than ever. I’m trying to put some strategies together to help me get better at these things. Some ear training is involved but man, so much brainpower needed, this stuff isn’t’ a walk in the park like the mindless motor development stuff.

Ne ways, great thread guys, I wish humans had another 20 years of life span even.

#36

This reminds me of all the stuff I ignored in Guitar For the Practising Musician magazine. All I cared about as a young fella was learning “which buttons to push” to make it sound like the record, but the transcriptions in that magazine typically came with a prose analysis that tried to explain the musical underpinnings of the solos and key licks.

One thing that CTC and other sources have made clear in recent years is the idea that completely freeform improvization is mostly a myth. I think the gap you’re alluding to is that many of us learned a bunch of licks over the years, either explicitly or from copying songs, without being “active listeners” in terms of understanding how those licks relate to the chord tones and their changes. Not that you can necessarily be aware of all the details of how every note of a fast lick fits a musical context at any given time, but you can still work to understand how a fast lick fits over a particular chord, or over a particular change.

You may be further along the “relearning licks in context” journey than I am, but one resource I’ve found promising are books from the popular “Fundamental Changes” series by Joseph Alexander. In particular, his “Blues Guitar Book Three: Beyond Pentatonics” and “Chord Tone Soloing For Jazz Guitar” are approachable yet instructive.

#37

I’m at a very nascent stage of this journey, I really like the Fundamental Changes series, to the point and don’t bog you down with too much info at any given point. I’ve added your recommendations into my want to by list, I might get them sooner than later if I don’t have much success with my own lesson plans, thank you :slight_smile:

I have a frightening selection of books I’ve collected over the years that I need to put to use. And there’s more.

4000×3000 1.91 MB

I have to come up with lesson plans for my self, one part would be to pick a tune from Robben Ford or Scott Henderson and try to take them apart while learning the tunes in a more meaningful way. The other would be an all things chords study.

Pretty daunting but it has to be done.

2 Likes
#38

Everyone raves about those Ted Greene books, but I haven’t looked into them yet. Piles get bigger, days stay the same length…

#39

Yeah man, not getting any younger either :slight_smile:

If I had to pick one desert island book it would be the Ted Greene Modern Chord Progressions book, most know the Chord Chemistry book, but that’s only a dictionary. The stories are in the Progressions book and can stand by itself with a life time and more of material.

#40

I think your take makes a lot of sense. My vote’s with that. I guess it’s just a language thing for me; I’m always doubting because these quotes always read like a ‘diptych’…

image It’s a rabbit… No, it’s duck!

I read once about Duane Allman going through an album, stopping on every lick he wanted to learn. There’s the dissecting and repeating, probably.

Another perspective helps, so thanks for that. I’m beginning to see the duck… I think;)

1 Like
#41

I don’t know where I said that, but I’ve typed lots of stuff on here so I don’t doubt I said that!

I wouldn’t read too much into what I did as a teenager. I did pretty much exclusively random jamming in my room and almost never methodical practice in the sense of playing an exercise a million times at slow-ish speeds to master it. Of course I * tried * that, because you were supposed to. I tried it on descending fours type phrases, all picked, across the strings, because I thought that’s what Yngwie was doing. But it was so incredibly boring to me and the lack of results was an instant downer. I couldn’t bring myself to keep doing it, and always felt guilty about that. So I would basically put on “Unchained” really loud and rock out.

Of course, a lot of that type of random jamming ends up being repetitive. All I knew the box position licks and a few Yngwie type scale fingerings. So that in itself is repetive practice of a sort. But I’m not sure if that’s really what is being asked about here.

Yes I slowed down phrases to figure out what they were. At some point in high school I could do the “Hot For Teacher” solo pretty much note for note, or as best I could tell from transcribing it. But that’s only because it was working. I didn’t find that stuff hard, so what I thought of as “real practice” wasn’t necessary.

Anyway I assume that’s not really what people are asking about when they post these kinds of questions. I think the bigger picture is still very simple. When it’s motor learning / motion acquisition, go fast first, and slow down a tiny bit to try and get more notes clean and figure out and/or become conscious of what the motion really is.

2 Likes
#42

Hopefully some ideas from my experiences can help some.

In 2020, I dedicated the year to 2 things: Learning Troy’s pickslanting concepts, and ditching “exercises” for learning difficult songs/solos from my favorite artists. In my previous 10+ years of guitar practice, I did mostly exercises and rarely learned any songs.

I grew more in 2020 than I had in the previous 3-4 years. Learning Petrucci’s The Best of Times, Under A Glass Moon, and Breaking All Illusions solos alone took a tremendous amount of effort, but I picked up so many new techniques, improved my speed, and most importantly - improved my overall feel.

I still ended up doing “exercises”, as I would break down the faster and more challenging segments and practice those slowly. But since these little segments were part of something bigger, they were immediately usable in a more tangible way than an typical exercise would be.

I would look forward to practicing guitar every single day, because I knew I would be one step closer to learning some of my favorite songs.

I also took a single lesson with an amazing YouTube guitarist, and my first question was about what he did to become so good. He said he just learned all of his favorite songs from Petrucci, Govan, Satriani, etc

I still think exercises are great (especially for those who are still beginners) to establish fundamental technique. But if I could do it over again, I would have spent less hours on the exercises, and more time slowly learning difficult songs throughout the years.

Lastly, this is obviously dependent on your tastes too. If someone was into music that didn’t present a challenge to learn, then learning songs could only take them so far. But aiming high by learning songs by the aforementioned artists can be extremely beneficial to all aspects of your playing.

3 Likes
#43

Right, but what you say prior is the key to understanding what “just learning songs” means…

That’s what has just clicked with me. I know it seems so elementary to some people, but I really didn’t get it until I pushed a little here to find out what people really meant by these statements. If you nail your notes the way you nail your words, you must be a good player;)

1 Like
#44

Just playing songs is a developer.

Whatever you practice is what you will improve.

When I was young I only played songs. Now, my eye sight isn’t what it once was, but I became proficient at sight reading. Way better then I am now.

I spent a lot of time improvising and jamming at one point. I got really good at that. Way better then I am now.

I spent the last little while doing lots of technical etudes with a metronome. I am by far the most technical and locked into the groove I’ve ever been. I can look at a piece of musics bpm or figure it out by ear and instantly lock in without the metronome. I’ve NEVER had that ability before.

Prior to that I wrote a little 6 track EP. by the end of that I was the best I’ve ever been at songwriting, I’m super proud of the music I was able to create and the melodies I rewrote lol.

There’s no “wasted time” I used to compete in track and field and martial arts. There were the guys at the top, they always believed in what they were doing. There were the guys in the middle like me who did it because it was fun, made us happy and enjoyed the process. Had some success but not to that same level. Then there were the guys who spent every second second guessing every little thing, reading forum article after forum article, constantly switching their training after two days, rewriting their program against the coaches instruction. Ultimately letting their sneakers or gloves collect dust and switching to something more black and white like video games.

Honestly man, the best thing you can do is pick up your guitar and listen to your heart. Some days nothing makes me happier then sitting and practicing 16th note economy picking with a metronome to see how fast I can go before it all falls apart. Other days I want to turn down the volume knob, throw on some long delay and reverb and vibe out. Other days I want to play a whole hour of iron maiden songs I learnt when I was 14. Some songs I want to learn the solo note for note, others I want to make sure I’m locked into the groove of the track and improvise the solos. Sometimes I make “mistakes” and prefer it to the original version and stick to that. Some licks I can’t play the way the original guy plays it and find my own way. I’ve had lessons with guys and shown them how I play it and they’ve copped that. Others have shown me how they learnt my stuff and it’s way easier and smarter then how I wrote it.

This isn’t a black and white process.

Just pick up your guitar and play, or don’t. Life’s too short.

I don’t understand how we have come to the point that there’s a post about whether playing music is a “developer” or a “waste of time”. Isn’t that the whole point?

2 Likes
#45

Mike, appreciate your insights; you obviously care a lot about music. But read the OP for your answer.

#46

As I said, that darned eye sight :wink:

I’d say in my opinion it worked for me and got me to an intermediate level and most people I’ve had the pleasure of playing with have a large repertoire of songs. I had a roommate in college who was an artist (painter) and he was an incredible musician but he ONLY ever approached the guitar as a landscape creator. It was almost impossible to jam with him because he had a specific vision and was unable to converse. Almost like trying to have a conversation with someone who is sitting on their laptop writing a midterm at the same time. It’s also worked for the students I have taught. I think it’s the best way to foster the passion and enjoyment of playing music.

The other stuff can come when issues arise or when exceptional skills can be elaborated on.

I had a hard time with sweep picking and 16th note tremolo picking I couldn’t learn it just from playing songs, I had to be more specific. I also was able to learn some skills immediately (Gilbert sixes, descending sextuplet runs, down picking rhythm playing) I was able to REALLY improve those with specific targeted practice.

The targeted practice is another intensely elaborate subject.

Is my failure in the technique? Am I tense? am I unable to hear how it is achieved? is it a timing issue? am I distracted by my rugby game tomorrow since my teammate broke his leg right in from of me last week and I don’t want to suffer the same fate? Am I hungry? Did I spend too much time in the paint studio and now I’m high off fumes and unable to focus?

There are answers to every problem that arises in playing but the questions come from playing songs (in my opinion). It also avoids you spending time answering questions that don’t need an answer. (How can I play cleanly on the 15th feet of my dreadnought?) answer- I’ve never had to.

#47

Beautifully put :slight_smile:

20 characters

2 Likes
#48

Lol, the sheer crippling amount of time I wasted years ago with stupid hypothetical situations:

“Like, what if I took this lick, but started on this stroke instead, and played it with an extra note here.”

^ A literal death sentence for developing good technique.

3 Likes
#49

If it makes you feel better, when I was studying guitar as a teenager I thought I’d have to practuce every possible melodic sequence in every possible key in every possible position, starting with any pickstroke, metronome at 40bpm then raise by a few bmps only if you get the thing right 16 times in a row.

It is easy to calculate whether this goal was achievable, and how much spare time I would have had for learning some music :slight_smile:

PS: luckily I didn’t have the discipline to actually do this, so I would often “procrastinate” by noodling some licks without the metronome. Ironically I think that’s where I made progress

5 Likes